Vice President Harris leads new charge to address racial bias in home appraisals
"For generations, many people of color have been prevented from taking full advantage of the benefits of homeownership," says Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Biden-Harris administration has unveiled steps the White House will take to combat systemic racism and bias in home appraisals across the country.
The set of actions, announced by Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, is a result of a special task force that was convened by President Joe Biden in 2021 to put forth recommendations to tackle racial disparities in home valuations. The measures are a follow-up to an action plan presented by the Interagency Task Force for Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) in March 2022.
“Homeownership is an essential part of the American dream,” Harris said, adding that it’s “one of the single most powerful engines of wealth building available to American families.”
“We also know for generations, many people of color have been prevented from taking full advantage of the benefits of homeownership,” she continued.
Harris noted that Black and Latino families are twice as likely than white families to have their homes undervalued and pay more for mortgages, and that they are less likely to get access to home equity lines of credit.
Racial bias in home appraisals has been identified by housing and economic experts as a major driver in these disparities.
As part of its plan to close the racial gap in home equity, the White House pledged to implement policies that: prevent algorithmic bias in home valuation, increase transparency by leveraging federal data, empower homeowners to take action against racial bias and diversify the appraisal profession.
Melody Taylor, executive director of the PAVE task force, told theGrio the measures are intended to create standards and strategies to eliminate racial discrimination in home appraisals. They also have the goal, she said, of improving the process for reconsideration of value, which is when a homeowner can ask a lender to reconsider a home valuation that the consumer believes to be inaccurate.
Harris recalled meeting Paul Austin and Tenisha Tate-Austin, a Black couple in California who suspected their initial appraisal was undervalued because of their race. During their second appraisal, the Tate-Austins asked a white friend to pose as the homeowner by putting up photographs of his family and meeting with the appraiser.
“As a result, their home was valued 50% higher than it was the first time,” the vice president noted. “Stories like Tanisha and Paul’s are far too common, and they are evidence that systemic change is needed.”
Taylor said consumers of color should not have to “whitewash” their home in order to get their property reappraised. For this reason, the task force she is leading has worked with federal banking agencies to propose guidance on how financial institutions may integrate reconsiderations of value policy controls into their current appraisal processes.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Financial Housing Administration are establishing a working group to increase coordination and develop more consistent standards for reconsideration of value processes of federally-backed lenders.
“It’s been a very significant opportunity for the task force to tackle this particular issue, especially because it has such a huge impact on consumers,” Taylor said.
She hopes that new appraisal data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency will help stakeholders see trends to better protect consumers.
Jesse Van Tol, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said in a public statement that he is particularly hopeful that the plans to diversify the appraisal industry will “cure one of the core issues in appraisals: the fact that the industry is 97% white and male.”
Tol added, “From what everyone now knows about the nature of implicit bias across all areas of life, it’s obvious that the uniformity of the population conducting property appraisals is likely generating unjust and discriminatory outcomes – whether intentionally or unintentionally.”
Harris noted that the announcement on home appraisals also marked the 102nd anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
“A white supremacist mob burned down Black-owned homes and businesses and decimated the Greenwood district known as Black Wall Street,” Harris said.
“And for decades, in communities across our nation, segregation, restrictive covenants, and redlining reinforced these inequities. And today, that legacy of inequities persists, in part, in the home appraisal system,” she added.
Taylor said it’s critical to look back at history in order to figure out the path forward, a notion that has guided the PAVE task force.
“We’ve taken a historical perspective around bias and where it originated and how – as early as the ’30s – race and the characteristics of communities were leveraged to devalue a home,” she told theGrio. “We’re trying to create guardrails that will allow industry and others to move forward in a way that reduces the opportunity for bias and, thereby, the policies around reconsideration of value.”
Most importantly, she said, the administration is educating and “empowering” homeowners to know what to do if they encounter bias in the appraisal industry and know the value of their property is evaluated “fairly and equitably … so they can transfer wealth” to their families.
She added, “We as a whole of government can influence the industry to be good corporate citizens around this work.”
Gerren Keith Gaynor is a White House Correspondent and the Managing Editor of Politics at theGrio. He is based in Washington, D.C.
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